[wordup] Live by the Pen, Die by the Sword [Mayan, long]

[Adam Shand]

From: The Eristocracy <Eristocracy at merrymeet.com>
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/17/science/social/17MAYA.html

Live by the Pen, Die by the Sword
JUL 17, 2001

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

At the height of the Maya civilization, the only literate society in
pre-Columbian America, kings fervently, perhaps desperately, believed in
the power of the pen. Whether they thought it mightier than the sword is
doubtful, but a growing body of evidence from Maya writing and art shows
that scribes played a central role in magnifying their king's reputation
and solidifying his political hold on the realm.

No royal court in the classic Maya period, especially from about A.D. 600
to 900, seems to have been without scribes of high rank. In paintings and
sculptures, they are seen seated cross-legged and wearing a sarong and
headcloth, with a bundle of pens and brushes at the ready. Some of the
painted or carved figures are accompanied by inscriptions identifying the
person as keeper of the royal library, the chief scribe.

The court scribes, archaeologists have concluded, came from the noble
class, sometimes from the royal family itself -- younger sons of rulers or
sons by secondary wives and concubines, and even some daughters. Their
duty was to prepare art and text for elaborate public displays glorifying
the king's triumphs. They were, in modern parlance, propagandists and
spinmeisters.

When times were good, scribes lived well, sometimes too well. One painting
of drunken revelry reveals that even then, writers on occasion had an
unbounded thirst. When their king met defeat in battle, though, the
scribes were among the first to suffer a cruel fate. And that, as much as
anything, an archaeologist has now pointed out, affirms the paramount
place of scribes and writing in Maya politics.

In a close study of texts and three imposing pieces of art, Dr. Kevin J.
Johnston, a Maya archaeologist at Ohio State University in Columbus,
determined that those who lived by the pen for a defeated ruler could
expect to die by the conqueror's sword. These scribes were captured,
humiliated in a public ceremony, mutilated and finally executed. A
favorite form of mutilation was breaking their fingers and tearing out
their fingernails.

Writing in the June issue of the journal Antiquity, Dr. Johnston
concluded, "Texts were a medium through which kings asserted and displayed
power, and thus they and the scribes who produced them were targeted
during warfare for destruction."

The fact that many of the captured scribes were kinsmen of the conquered
king and suspected of continued loyalty might have contributed to their
fate. But the methods of public torture suggest that the conquerors also
intended to send an unambiguous message.

"What captors chose to emphasize in public documents was not the physical
elimination of the scribes through sacrifice but the destruction through
finger mutilation of their capacity to produce for rivals politically
persuasive texts," Dr. Johnston wrote. "Finger breaking was a significant
political act because it produced and revealed the vulnerability of
enemies and competitors."

Dr. Johnston said in an interview that these previously unrecognized
practices underscored the importance of the written word and monumental
art in reinforcing the power and authority of Maya kings. They were forms
of what he called "competitive display," meant to intimidate people into a
state of loyalty.

Because most Maya city-states were small and inherently weak, Mayanists
say, kings typically had to resort to such ceremonial strategies to help
justify and maintain their power. In the late classic period, there were
at least 40 city-states across the heart of the Maya domain, which
included what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and part of
Honduras. No single king apparently ever managed to control a wide section
of the land.

Dr. David Webster, a Mayanist at Penn State, said he agreed with much of
Dr. Johnston's thesis, particularly the role of scribes in proclaiming
royal authority through competitive displays.

"A king who is not very confident brags a lot," Dr. Webster said. " `I am
the king,' he brags all over the lowlands. The next king is only 30
kilometers away and he's saying, `No, I am the king.' There's a lot of
status rivalry, and so they build lavish palaces and have a lot of
feasting and other ceremonial displays."

A more risky alternative course for enhancing a king's reputation was
warfare, which among the Maya often stemmed from "status rivalry" between
neighboring rulers, not necessarily from an appetite for more territory.
After a war, a monument prepared by a loyal scribe- painter soon went up
in the victor's city. The triumphant king is shown standing heroically on
the backs of prostrate captives -- the Maya version of a photo-op.

Several other specialists in Mayan archaeology said they found Dr.
Johnston's research convincing.

"It's a new perspective based on what had been stray pieces of evidence
that we haven't been putting together before," said Dr. Stephen D.
Houston of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Dr. David Freidel of Southern Methodist University in Dallas said the
research provided important insights into "a war of words" the Maya seemed
to have waged through much of their classical period, before the
civilization went into sharp decline around 900.

In his judgment, Dr. Freidel said, the Maya were a history-minded people
and their scribes were not just mechanical transcribers but were the
historians, intent on defining their culture and imposing their own
interpretation of history. The destruction of monuments and inscriptions
was one city's way of erasing the history of an enemy. But he questioned
the premise that the Maya civilization was more politically fragile than
most others.

Modern scholars think that the Maya glyphs are one of only three writing
systems -- the other two being Sumerian cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia
and Chinese -- to be invented independently. All others were probably
modeled after or influenced by existing scripts. Maya was the last of the
three scripts to be deciphered, beginning in the 1950's; it has given
scholars a clearer picture of Maya history.

In an attractive and definitive book on the subject, "The Art of the Maya
Scribe," Dr. Michael D. Coe, a specialist in Maya writing at Yale, said
studies of monumental inscriptions since the decipherment began had
"revealed entirely unsuspected details not only of the social and
political organization of particular Maya cities, but of their
relationships -- often but not always hostile -- between them."

The book's co-author is Justin Kerr, a New York photographer who took most
of the color pictures of the sculptures, wall paintings and images on
stone monuments that document the roles of Maya scribes as both writers
and artists.

One of the crucial decipherments relating to scribes, Dr. Coe said, was
made in 1995 by Dr. Nikolai Grube, a German authority on Maya writing.
Examining titles occurring on ceramics and monuments, he interpreted the
phrase ah k'u hun to mean "keeper of the royal library." This showed the
robed person to be a scribe, not a priest, and to be an esteemed member of
the royal court. Further investigation showed that the title often
accompanied a person wearing the distinctive scribal costume of sarong,
headcloth and bundles of brush pens and carving tools.

Another term for a Maya scribe is ah ts'ib, "he of the writing." When
still an undergraduate, Dr. David Stuart, now a Mayanist at Harvard,
determined that this term was often followed by a name, evidence that at
least the highest-ranking scribes were signing their works of art. The
title appears to refer to people who were both calligraphers and painters
or sculptors.

With their new ability to read Maya glyphs, scholars have learned that
these scribes differed in several respects from those in Egypt and Sumer.
Early Egyptian and Sumerian writing was used primarily for practical
matters, like records of commercial transactions and day-to- day
activities in the palace and temples. And scribes there could come from
humble origins.

"Unlike the Egyptians and Sumerians, Maya writing doesn't appear to have
been used for a lot of pragmatic political and economic purposes," said
Dr. Webster, of Penn State. "Maya kings and elite did not run such a
hands-on economy. Their scribes came from their own class, and their
writing tended to be for ritual and royal purposes."

In the journal article, Dr. Johnston cited three pieces of art to support
his thesis that scribes of defeated kings were regularly captured and
tortured -- evidence of the influential political role of Maya scribes.

At the ruins of Piedras Negras, in Guatemala, images and inscriptions on a
stone monument show the city's victorious king and two of his lieutenants
standing over nine noblemen from Pomona, a nearby city-state. "All are
bound and semi-nude -- a sign of submission and humiliation," Dr. Johnston
wrote, and glyphs on the thigh of one captive mark him as "first person of
the pen."

Sculptures in the palace at Palenque, in the Chiapas state of southern
Mexico, document three stages of ceremony after the capture of scribes,
Dr. Johnston said. After the first stage, public display, the captives are
depicted in the stages of mutilation and sacrifice. One scribe has
suffered two deep bloodletting incisions on his penis, and a cavity in his
chest indicates that his heart has been extracted. Another scribe is shown
with his right hand hanging down unnaturally, suggesting that the fingers
have been broken.

At Bonampak, also in Chiapas, Dr. Johnston pointed out, murals depicted in
vivid red paint captives that he said had "suffered two indignities: their
fingers have been broken and are bleeding copiously, and their fingernails
have been torn out."

One figure in the scene is holding aloft in his right hand a quill pen, a
gesture that Dr. Johnston said was a Maya pictorial convention for scribal
activity. The mural also includes examples of captives who have been
executed, one by decapitation and another by having his heart cut out,
while broken fingers dripped blood.

"The evidence is very suggestive, and Johnston makes a good argument,"
said Dr. Houston, of Brigham Young, although he and some other Mayanists
raised questions about the interpretation of the Bonampak mural.

In his research, Dr. Johnston found an entry in a 16th-century dictionary
of Mayan languages that describes what the Bonampak mural seems to
illustrate, and it suggests a recognition long ago of the relationship
between writing and royal power. For the word "fingernails" the dictionary
provides as the single entry a formal lament. Translated, it reads: "I
have no fingernails; I am no longer the person I used to be. I no longer
have power or authority or money; I am no one."